The impact of the melancholy, metaphysical art of Giorgio de Chirico (1888–1978) had much to do with his unique ability to see antiquity anew, and to locate its props in mysterious, atemporal dreamscapes. De Chirico loaded his depictions of Greek and Roman statues and architecture with muted intimations of allegory, locking away their meanings in foreboding enigmas that were among the earliest articulations of the Surrealist project. Published for a 2013 exhibition at the Phillips Collection in Washington, DC, Giorgio de Chirico: Myth and Archaelogy gathers a selection of lesser-known early works by de Chirico--bronze sculptures and drawings that address the artist’s innovative use of myth (such as Dioscuri, the Argonauts and Ariadne), archaeological artifacts and historical events from the classical era.

Published by The Museum of Modern Art, New York.Text by Emily Braun.

The unexpected encounter of a rubber glove, a green ball and the head from the classical statue of the Apollo Belvedere gives rise to one of the most compelling paintings in the history of modernist art: Giorgio de Chirico’s “The Song of Love” (1914). De Chirico made his career in Paris in the years before World War I, combining his nostalgia for ancient Mediterranean culture with his fascination for the curios found in Parisian shop windows. Beloved by the Surrealists, this uncanny image exemplifies de Chirico’s radical “metaphysical” painting, which creates a disturbing sense of unreality, outside logical space and time, through the novel depiction of ordinary things. Emily Braun’s essay explores the sources behind the work’s enigmatic motifs, its influence on avant-garde painters and poets, and its continuing ability to captivate viewers as de Chirico intended, even a century after it was made.

Paintings 1909-1973

Published by Walther König.Text by Gerd Roos.

As a forerunner of Pittura metafisica (Metaphysical art), Greek-Italian painter Giorgio de Chirico (1888-1978) exerted a powerful influence on the subsequent development of Surrealism, New Objectivity and Magic Realism. For example, well before the Surrealists, de Chirico had discovered the power of the unconscious and the independent language of objects. Influenced by the symbolic painting of Arnold Böcklin and the dream pictures of Max Klinger, he created his provocative city views of deserted or statically enlivened squares. At the same time, he made ironically intellectual self-portraits that now form a large part of the artist's complete oeuvre. In this enlightening volume, curator and de Chirico scholar Gerd Roos discusses the artist's development as it is reflected in his times; his break with his innovative, seminal painting style; and his turn to a traditional, academic concept of art.

Published by Exact Change.By Giorgio de Chirico. Introduction by John Ashbery. Translated by John Ashbery and Mark Polizzotti, et al.

The artist Giorgio de Chirico's novel, Hebdomeros is a dream-like book of situations and landscapes reminiscent of his paintings. In his introduction John Ashbery calls the book “the finest work of Surrealist fiction,” noting that de Chirico “invented for the occasion a new style and a new kind of novel... his long run-on sentences, stitched together with semi-colons, allow a cinematic freedom of narration... his language, like his painting, is invisible: a transparent but dense medium containing objects that are more real than reality.” Hebdomeros is accompanied by an appendix of previously untranslated or uncollected writings, including M. Dudron's Adventure, a second, fragmentary novel translated by John Ashbery.